Militarizing Law Enforcement and Organized Criminal Violence in Mexico

• In Event: Violent Democracy in the Global South: Evidence from Mexico

Abstract

Across the developing world, governments are increasingly relying on the armed forces to confront organized crime. What are the effects of militarizing law enforcement on the dynamics of organized criminal violence? Challenging dominant theories of military effectiveness, the argument claims that militarizing security policies exacerbates criminal violence by disrupting the territorial balance between criminal groups. By focusing on Mexico, the analysis uses a machine-generated event database of criminal violence at the daily-municipal level for all Mexican municipalities between 2000 and 2018 with about 18 million observations. To overcome the endogeneity inherent to state-criminal interactions, the empirical strategy leverages the exogenous variation of commander’s differential experience—that is the comparison between the outgoing and incoming general’s professional trajectory—across Mexico’s military zones. The disaggregated analysis of non-violent and violent law enforcement tactics shows that more experienced commanders deploy more aggressive and sophisticated repertories than less seasoned predecessors. Yet, this increasing aggressiveness exacerbates inter-criminal violence and retaliation against the state. The analysis also reveals heterogeneous effects across territories marked by distinct illicit markets.

Author

• Javier Osorio, University of Arizona